What would be a 'killer' feature you would like to have in a chess GUI?

Gaviota engine from Miguel Ballicora displays emoticons in the PV line printout according to the evaluation of the game. Would that be a good idea extending it to the GUI showing different animated faces during the game?

I personally would like to have a geek dashboard with all detailed information from the chess engine thinking process.

What would be a 'killer' feature you would like to have in a chess GUI?

Gaviota engine from Miguel Ballicora displays emoticons in the PV line printout according to the evaluation of the game. Would that be a good idea extending it to the GUI showing different animated faces during the game?

I personally would like to have a geek dashboard with all detailed information from the chess engine thinking process.

What would YOU like to have?

I definitely would like a "comment" extension to the ici protocole, that would get text displayed by the GUI. It could either be purely chess-technical ("this endgame is won by black"...) or humorous ("hold your horses, meat bag!"...).

In WinBoard an engine can print anything it likes in the Engine Output window. UCI info strings appear there. My WinBoard engines print many infos from the search there (like static eval, and some of its terms indicidually).

What you ask seems more a protocol extension than a GUI feature, however. GUIs are not psychic, and cannot play info the engines do not send them, or format information in a sensible way that they don't know the meaning of.

A "geeky dashboard" would be a information display that shows as much as possible about the computers thinking process. It could be displayed by using live charts and textually.

In WinBoard an engine can print anything it likes in the Engine Output window. UCI info strings appear there. My WinBoard engines print many infos from the search there (like static eval, and some of its terms indicidually).

What you ask seems more a protocol extension than a GUI feature, however. GUIs are not psychic, and cannot play info the engines do not send them, or format information in a sensible way that they don't know the meaning of.

You don't have to be so attached to current protocol limitations. Even though you could still arbitrarily interpret the values given by engines evaluation like jumps in the score, showing happy/surprised/sad faces.
Just freely throw out some ideas. It could be technically addressed in another moment.

JuLieN wrote:
I definitely would like a "comment" extension to the ici protocole, that would get text displayed by the GUI. It could either be purely chess-technical ("this endgame is won by black"...) or humorous ("hold your horses, meat bag!"...).

I like that. Users in general are more engaged when there is more interaction with the game. It's more fun that way.

Something I have not read before would be to allow for per engine score and score-variance calibration.

The most streight forward one would be to allow for an engine like SF to set: f(score) = score /2

Maybe one could make it more elaborate and allow for a multivariate regression equation (where the gui exposes a series of easily accessible parameters):
f(score, #blocked_pawns, material_white, material_black, etc.) = ...

next one could differentiate and add different functions for win, draw probability. furthermore one could add a function also taking depth, nodes searched and statistics about previous PVs to predict the score variability.

Eventually engine users would independently look for well predicting parameters running regressions over their game logs. These paramters can be exchanged online for the whole comunity to benefit.

I see the following gains:
a) we get more information out than just some arbitrary centipawn score
b) one can compare different engines output better
c) the GUI can correct for engine differences and engine specific score informations e.g. the point of view of the scores, Depth to conversion, different types of draw, etc.

The system would be evolutionary with gradually improving predictors as more people get involved.

What would be a 'killer' feature you would like to have in a chess GUI?

Gaviota engine from Miguel Ballicora displays emoticons in the PV line printout according to the evaluation of the game. Would that be a good idea extending it to the GUI showing different animated faces during the game?

I personally would like to have a geek dashboard with all detailed information from the chess engine thinking process.

What would YOU like to have?

I promised to Fern that Gaviota have "taunting" messages, and comments during the game. However, it is not easy to do this efficiently with the current protocols and GUIs. It would be nice to have a window/terminal (not pop ups!) in which the engine dumps there whatever it wants, comments, emoticons etc. that it is part of a protocol. Is that the geeky dashboard you mentioned?

jdart wrote:An integration of a GUI with some kind of automated book learning facility would be interesting. Some engines support this but I am not aware that the common GUIs do.

-Jon

Fritz/CB ctg trees can have variable move weights based on learning, independent of engine used. This is nice, but the Fritz book learning feature cannot add new moves to the tree (the way old Mchess used to do, for example).

What I'd like to see more GUIs have is the ability to exclude multiple moves from infinite analysis. Some GUIs can do this already.

Better deep analysis features would also be welcome. We're still in the dark ages when it comes to such features.